Below Suspicion (15 page)

mustard-coloured suit, laughed and straightened up and turned round.

"Finished?" inquired Patrick Butler.

"All yours, chum," the sleek-haired one said amiably. His mustard-coloured suit was so new and brash that it shouted. Thirty guineas; all mine. Like it?' He handed the cue to Butler, who took it.

"Anybody been asking for me tonight?"

The sleek-haired one's eyes narrowed. "I seen you before," he stated.

"Name of Renshaw," said Butler. "Bob Renshaw."

The sleek-haired one, sensing a kindred spirit who wanted to place a bet, lifted his voice above the blatter of talk and the cold smoke-mist.

"Anybody looking for Renshaw?" he shouted. "Bob Renshaw?"

There was a silence so brief that it might have gone unnoticed. Yet through it, as through a sudden rift in smoke, you might hear the louder click-click against green felt. A buzz of talk drowned it out, with one or two absentminded negatives. If Patrick Butler sensed the wave of danger that flowed through that room, he gave no sign of it.

"Bad luck," sympathized the sleek-haired one. "Alone?"

"Yes."

"Well, 'ave a smack at it anyway," suggested the sleek-haired one, jerking a thumb towards the pool table. "Easy as kiss-your-'and, after snooker."

"Thanks. I think I will."

The pool balls, vividly coloured and each with a number, thudded out on the table as Butler pushed up the pockets. He circled the table, gathering up the balls and racking them in their wooden triangle. Then he removed the triangle, its point towards his original position on the side near the unlocked door. He would stay on that side of the table, he decided.

Nine minutes until he must meet Lucia! Only nine minutes!

And, while he waited for some reply to 'Bob Renshaw,' he wanted to

think about his new idea of the defence of Lucia Renshaw

Bending down to sight along the cue, with the white cue ball gleaming ahead, he broke with a clatter that sent the bright-coloured spheres rolling wide.

"It's not as good an idea as I'd thought," he said to himself, his original enthusiasm cooling. "It can't help Lucia with regard to the death of Dick Renshaw. But it does prove she couldn't have killed Mrs. Taylor."

(Don't get too immersed in your thoughts, now. Keep steady.)

"Balham, where Mrs. Taylor lived, is in South London. Lucia lives in North London. I don't know how many miles they are apart, but it's a devil of a distance. How did Lucia get there and back—at that time of the night?"

Butler, never moving or raising his head, saw the table as a green blur in front of him.

"The Renshaws' don't have a car. Old Mrs. Taylor died between ten o'clock and midnight, probably closer to midnight. No taxi-driver would have taken her so far. If she went at all, she'd have had to use one of those drive-hire-with-chauffeur cars; and there'd be a record. But there won't be a record, because she never went at all.

"That'll prove it at one go! Now if I could only think of a way in which Renshaw's water-bottle could have been poisoned, the case will be wide open. It's so simple a puzzle that the explanation ought to be simple too. Only three persons, Lucia and Kitty and Miss Cannon, were in that bedroom. Practically speaking, we can exclude Miss.. . ."

Here Butler's musings stopped abruptly, with a jar and start.

Something was wrong in the billiard-saloon.

He himself had not been trying to play. He had been merely potting at anything in sight. A green pool ball rebounded from the far cushion, with a noise he could hear distinctly, and spun back to him across a vast, intense silence.

No bilhard-click, no voice or foot-shuffle or cue-rattle, stirred in that room. No sense, even of breathing or movement. Only malignancy, fastened on him like the ray of a burning-glass.

To Patrick Butler it seemed that he was alone. Briefly he raised his eyes.

11

IN A SENSE he was alone, 3'es. Of all the men who had been in that room, only two remained.

A dirty Venetian blind, its shutters closed, had been lowered across the front window. Another Venetian blind masked the glass panel of the front door. The three ceiling-lights, yellow and watery, illumined only cold smoke-haze and two deserted tables.

On a bench under the front window there sat, with knees crossed idly, a lean man in a buff-coloured eyeshade which evidently designated him as the proprietor. On the opposite side of the room from Butler, a little way down towards the front, the second man leaned negligently with his back against a rack of cues on the wall.

The second man, who had his hands in his pockets, wore a much-darned and patched black jersey of the sort used in 5ghters' training camps. He was bigger than Patrick Butler, much broader, and so heavily muscled that his paunch hardly showed. He needed a haircut, and he had a flat nose.

The silence lengthened. Neither of the two men as much as glanced at Butler.

" 'E ain't much good at that game, is 'e?" inquired the man with the eyeshade, as though referring to somebody on a distant planet.

"No," said the other, in thickened bass. " 'E ain't much good at that game, is 'e?"

"I mean, 'e ain't no good at that game."

"Ar. 'E ain't no good at that game at all."

A small coal of rage burned in Butler's chest. He had heard this sort of talk often; it was merely that of the ten-year-old boy in the adult body. And he had come on a peaceful mission.

"I think," he said clearly, putting down his cue on the table, "you're the two men I wanted to see."

Again there was a silence. Then the man in the eye-shade suddenly rocked back on the bench and began to laugh. Two of his teeth—the front ones—were gold teeth. But he stopped laughing almost immediately.

" 'E wants to see us," observed Gold-teeth sadly, " 'E wants to see us, Em."

"Ar."

"Now why would 'e want to see us?" jeered Gold-teeth.

The man called Em straightened up to his full height and breadth. The rack of cues rattled behind him. Deliberately he drew his left hand out of his pocket, and fitted on his right hand a heavy pair of brass knuckles. Over this—while darting a little eager glance at Butler—he drew a very thin black glove, almost shapeless.

Then Em admired his handiwork. That glove would steady hand and wrist when the fist cut and crushed.

"Now what would 'e do," asked Gold-teeth with interest, "if you was to sort of caress 'im with that?"

"I expect 'e wouldn't like it."

"No, 'e wouldn't like it. But what could 'e do about it?"

"Why," said Em with satisfaction, " 'e couldn't do nothink, could 'e?"

"No, 'e couldn't do nothink. Nothink at all."

Patrick Butler stood negligently by the table, with seething rage inside him and an agreeable smile on his face.

Fear crawled through him, up from his stomach and through his arms. What overrode the fear was his simple belief that people like these were beneath contempt. If they could not be ignored, they ought to be killed.

Idly he looked at the pool balls nearest him. They were of a neat size and weight, each balancing nicely in the hand. With a throw of—yes; about twenty-five feet—you could smash a skull to pulp. So Butler continued to smile. And one of the pool balls was already concealed in his right hand.

"Of course," said Gold-teeth, prolonging the agony, "you don't want to be too 'ard on 'im."

"You seen me work before, ain't you? Am I all right?"

"Oh, ah! Sure you are. But we don't want him to call us names, now do we?"

" 'E won't call anybody no names."

"But 'e might not think it was nice, see what I mean? 'E won't call nobody no names; but wot might 'e call us if he could talk?"

Patrick Butler spoke in his courtroom manner.

"I call you bastards," he said pleasantly, "What do you propose to do about it?"

The pause, this time, was as startling as the stab of a dagger. Both Gold-teeth and Em looked at him full in the face. Then the whole scene exploded,

"Do it proper, Em!" Gold-teeth said viciously,

Patrick Butler's arm whipped forward. And he threw to kill.

The ball, a vivid red colour, crashed into the cue-rack half an inch from Em's head. One cue, splintered in half, flew against others; they toppled and rained down, clattering from the rack and banging the floor in thin echoes, over the shoulders and at the feet of Em himself.

(I was nervous. I missed him. No more throwing to kill, Pat Butler/ But it got something out of my system.)

Over across the dim room, beyond the tables, Em's face was that of a cruel small boy swollen rather than grown to manhood. He did not seem to realize what had happened until the fallen pool ball rolled past him.

"I'll-do-yer-fer-that," Em yelled. And again he plunged forward.

{No landing in jail, fool! Get him where ... now!)

Butler did not miss with his second throw. The ball, a green streak, whacked the shoulder at the junction of the right arm. Em spun sideways and staggering amid fallen cues, fell on his back. His arm and black glove were as helpless as a sponge. He tried to move his arms and legs feebly, like a life-sized black beetle.

"Now for you, Goldy," said Butler,

It was Gold-teeth he really hated. But Gold-teeth, sitting on the bench under the window, had nipped his hand behind the Venetian blind and rapped sharply on the window for help. A pool ball crashed into the Venetian blind, whose loose flaps absorbed the shock without breaking the window. Goldy, snatching back his fingers and showing his front teeth like a jeering rabbit, ducked to safety under the line of the first table.

For a few moments the place was as eerily silent as a room in Pompeii. Butler, in overcoat and soft hat, had begun to sweat. Just a little behind him, on his left, was the unlocked side-door. Its key was gripped in his left hand. That side-door led—God knew where.

The front door, its Venetian blind trembling, opened softly. Four men, so nondescript that Butler could not have described them, entered Just as quietly.

"Spread out," came the gloating voice of Gold-teeth. "Keep down belovi' the tables. Use the moleys when you catch 'im."

The moley was an extraordinary potato, its surface jagged with the edges of safety-razor blades. They ground it into your face, twisted it, and—

" 'E's for it," called Gold-teeth tenderly. " 'E's for it now!"

For about five seconds Butler fired at the newcomers as fast as he could snatch up pool balls. Missiles, yellow and red and blue, streaked down the room like tracer-bullets in an air raid. Another cue-rack toppled and clattered down. One of the newcomers, hit below the belt, screamed and doubled up. Em, who was trying to struggle to his feet despite a broken shoulder, slipped on the fallen cues and lurched on his face.

Butler—with one last glimpse of rebounded pool balls thumping and dancing round the floor with maniacal life—darted out the side-door and closed it behind him. His hands were shaking so much that he almost dropped the key. Running feet pounded inside. He locked the door just in time.

And now he knew where he was.

A narrow passage, lying parallel with the depth of the billiard-saloon, stretched away on his right to a street door. That street door beside the front door of 136, which from outside had seemed nailed-up or deserted since before the war!

On his left, as he stood in the passage, a flight of steps went up to a landing with a lighted doorway. From that doorway drifted the strains of dance music. . . .

Lucia's club. The battered-looking street door was its real entrance.

Butler instantly raced up the stairs. The part of prudence would have been to get to blazes out of here by the street door. But he had promised to meet Lucia. And Patrick Butler, the Irishman, still had a little score to settle with Gold-teeth.

Dance music blared louder on the landing. A glance inside the dim-lit doorway told Butler why Lucia had said, "You don't know who you're dancing with." The dancers, both men and women, all wore masks of black or white or pink. Some were domino masks, but most added a length of cloth which hid the whole face.

On the landing by the door, a young man of Spanish appearance sat behind a table on which lay an open ledger and a number of masks. Butler straightened up and assumed his lordliest manner.

"A mask, please," he said.

"Yes, sarel" The young man jumped up, giving him a quick vivid look, and yanked open the desk drawer which served as a till. "Eet weel be one pound, sarel"

(Bang went the faint thud of a fist on the door below. Gold-teeth and his playmates were in a mood for no less than murder.)

Very deliberately Butler selected a black mask, inspecting it. Then he dropped five pounds on the table.

"You haven't seen me, understand?" he demanded impressively.

"No, sare. No!"

Butler hurried into the dance-room. After three paces he stopped and turned round. The young man with the black Spanish eyes, as Butler expected, had instantly and softly started downstairs to turn the key and admit Gold-teeth and the flood of wasps.

Just as softly, while the young man's back was turned, Butler darted back to the dance-room door only long enough to exchange his black mask for a pink mask underneath the pile on the table. Then he hurried back among the jumbled crowded dancers.

This so-called club was hot and frowsty, not large and not much cleaner than the billiard-saloon below. Along two walls ran a line of bare tables, with dancing-space between. An old, dim, rickety spotlight, fastened at one corner of the ceiling, shifted its colours to red, yellow, purple—like slow-floating missiles—and turned the masked faces to a nightmare.

Yet the club exhaled a sensuality which went straight to Butler's head. Women in masks, as has been known even in England for three hundred years, are women in a yielding mood.

Butler, trying to move without stumbling between the dancers and the right-hand row of tables, whipped off hat and overcoat.

(On with the pink mask, now; they'll look ioi a black one. Where can J find a dancing partner.? Where . . . O benevolent Providence/)

At the back of the room, and surprisingly enough alone at a table, sat a woman whose face was covered by a long white mask, her hair by a white scarf wound turban-fashion. The very dim light concealed the fact that her black velvet gown, cut low in front, was old and shabby.